News category: News

Deemed “An excellent educational source about how to think, plan, and conduct research on culture and psychology…” by Eric Shiraev of George Mason University, it is clear that the new book release from SDT faculty member Valery Chirkov is one to add to your ‘To Read’ list under the ‘Research on Cultures‘ category.

This book is the first of its kind, brimming with detailed guidelines for studying the behavior of people in different cultures. In order to conduct the most effective studies, the approach to the research is multi-disciplinary, incenting readers to focus on contentions between individuals and their socio-cultural environments.

Valery Chirkov, Professor of Psychology at the University of Saskatchewan, Canada has embedded his latest book with learning objectives, questions, exercises, recommended readings, examples, tables and figures; reviewing step by step of the research process and delving into the core philosophical and theoretical assumptions that are present when researching cultural issues.

Intended for students (advanced undergraduate and graduate) and researchers alike, ‘Fundamentals of Research on Culture and Psychology: Theory and Methods’ is “indispensable to the beginning or seasoned researcher who studies psychological processes in cultural context” – Charles Helwig, University of Toronto, Canada.

Click here for more information

Click here to read more publications by SDT Faculty Member Valery Chirkov

‘What do thought leaders say about wellness?’

Dr. James Kelly interviews Dr. Richard Ryan on the ‘Brave Endurance Wellness Podcast’. Richard Ryan discusses Self-Determination Theory, Intrinsic Motivation and his journey.

Listen to the podcast.

Eighty-one percent of US STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) university faculty members are men. A Montana State University team led by Jessi L. Smith is attempting to change this substantial gender disparity.

Using Self-determination theory as their basis, they formulated a three-step intervention, a faculty recruiting procedure with each part focusing on the three psychological needs, competence, autonomy, and relatedness.
In self-determination theory, when these three psychological needs are met, creativity, motivation, and performance of the individual will prosper.

Search committees were assigned to intervention groups and then given a ‘faculty search toolkit’. To enhance competence and autonomy of the committee members, the toolkit came with instructions on how to conduct a ‘broad applicant search’ and how to overcome any underlying gender bias. To enhance their relatedness, members were paired for support.

With 23 Stem faculty searches conducted over one year, the intervention was successful and consequently, searches were over 6 times more likely to make an offer to a female candidate, and female candidates who were made an offer were almost 6 times more likely to accept the offer.

The authors deemed the results a successful demonstration of how applying psychological theory can achieve improved practical results.

You can check out the results published in BioScience.

Click here to read the News post on EurekAlert – Science News.

Click here to read the article

The anticipated new book ‘Goal Setting and Motivation in Therapy: Engaging Children and Parents’ by editors Jenny Ziviani, Anne Poulsen & Monica Cuskelly has just been released!

Including a foreword by Richard Ryan, the book highlights the importance of goal-setting and goal pursuit in children’s therapy, rendering it a vital motivational component. It involves principal information on Self-Determination Theory and offers advice on empathetic collaboration with the child and their family.

The book is deemed an invaluable resource for a wide spectrum of professionals working with children.

Check out the new book on Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/Goal-Setting-Motivation-Therapy-Engaging-ebook/dp/B00WRNEM4S

Jamie Madigan, author of the new book ‘Getting Gamers: The Psychology of Video Games and Their Impact on the People Who Play Them’, answered this question by pointing to Edward Deci and Richard Ryan’s Self-Determination Theory.

Madigan notes that it is “curious and sometimes baffling that people will willingly spend hours and hours playing games that simulate jobs that they wouldn’t enjoy nearly as much.”

So, if you’re a city dweller who wouldn’t dream of shoveling hay yet has a fascination with the new ‘Farming Simulator 16’ game, Madigan says it is largely because “you get to make choices that you could never make in the real world’s equivalent of that activity. They strip away all the bureaucracy, consequences, and — let’s be honest — necessary restrictions that the real world imposes on work, and they let you experience an idealized and imminently convenient version of that job”.

In order “to understand the real reasons why those characteristics are appealing,” Madigan says “it helps to understand a little basic psychological theory” and discover what motivates and demotivates people at work.

Madigan labels Self-Determination Theory as one of the major theories of human motivation in the last few decades, defining it in his words as a “model describing what makes an activity intrinsically motivating. That is, what makes an activity its own best reason for continuing to do it.”

He concludes that “Decades of research on self determination theory shows that activities that satisfy autonomy, competence, and relatedness are intrinsically motivating” and “well-designed video games hit on all three of these cylinders”.

To read in full:

http://venturebeat.com/2015/10/10/why-we-like-to-play-simulations-of-jobs-wed-hate-in-real-life/

July 22nd 2015. 

Gregory Chertok, a sport psychology counselor and fitness trainer at the Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation Center in Englewood, New Jersey cites self-determination theory when touting the social benefits of laughter yoga.

“Chertok noted that writer and researcher Norman Cousins, whose book “Anatomy of an Illness” influenced Kataria, famously referred to laughter as ‘internal jogging.’

He said the Self-Determination Theory, a psychological theory of motivation, says that anyone seeking a healthy lifestyle must feel three things: autonomy, competence, and relatedness.”

To read the full article:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/inspired-life/wp/2015/07/22/laughter-yoga-replaces-ommm-with-hahaha/

By: Dorene Internicola, Washington Post

June 8th 2015. 

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